Dec 28, 2008

If you want to change the sound played by windows xp for a particular event such as startup, shutdown, critical error etc. you can do that easily by defining sound the file which you want to be played. But remember, the file should be in a .wav format. You can also stop windows from playing that sound every time the event occurs.

Go to the Control Panel Start > Settings > Control Panel

Double click on Sounds icon

Scroll through the list of event sounds and select the program and the related event that you want to modify

Use controls at the bottom to disable (set sound name to "None") or select a different sound

Some times while working in DOS, you need to copy some text to other applications like MS Word. But you cannot directly copy your text by pressing Ctrl+C and paste it by Ctrl+V. The solution is as follows:

"Start > Programs > Command Prompt > DOS"

Run the character mode program that you want to import data from, and go to the screen with the data you want to capture.

Right click the title bar of the DOS box

Select "Edit | Mark"

Click and drag the mouse until you select the data area that you want to copy. Press ENTER when you've finished selecting.

Switch to the Windows program that you want to import the just copied data to, and select its paste function.

Dec 25, 2008

If you have to turn your computer off and back on immediately, wait for some time, say about 30 seconds before turning it back on. That gives the drive (or drives, if you have more than one) plenty of time to finish spinning and park their heads before they get the wake-up jolt. Otherwise the heads could damage the drive surface. This may lead to loss of data or replacement of your drive(s).

Windows xp balloon tips can be very annoying at times. There is a way to turn them off. Go to Start > Run.Type Regedit and hit enter.Navigate to ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrrentVersion/Explorer’

In the right pane, right click and click new click DWORD. Name the new entry as ‘EnableBalloonTips’ and assign it a value of ‘0’.

When you copy any text, image or take a screen shot of the screen this data gets automatically in a program called clipboard. You may have come across messages by some applications asking you to leave or clear the data stored in clipboard. This is where your copied date is stored temporarily. To view the saved data in clipboard, open the run dialog box by clicking start > run. Type clipbrd and hit enter. You can see the clipboard window and the copied data in it.

In windows xp, when an application crashes, you press Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the Task Manager to close the non responding program manually by pressing the end task button. But the application does not end immediately but takes some time to do so. You can actually reduce this time by making a registry tweak.

To do this, click on start menu and click run to open the run dialog box.In the run dialog box type regedit and hit enter.

In the resulting window, navigate yourself to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Desktop’

In the right pane, you will find a number of entries. Double click the one having the name ‘HungAppTimeout’. The edit string menu pops up. The default value in the value data field is 5000. this is the time in milliseconds after which the hung application ends. Reduce the value to about 500 or 600 and click ok.

Dec 24, 2008

When you take pictures in landscape mode from your camera and then transfer them to pc, you have to manually turn them clockwise or anticlockwise. This takes up a lot of time. To fix it, select the photos that you want to turn by holding the ctrl key, and right click on any one of the selected files and click rotate clockwise or rotate counterclockwise as per the requirement. There you go…all in one go!

To insert dummy text quickly in MS Word 2003, simply type =rand(m,n) and press enter, where ‘m’ is the number of paragraphs and ‘n’ is the number of sentences per paragraph. This trick is useful if you want to print a test page.

e.g. if you want to print a dummy text containing 5 number of paragraphs and 6 number of sentences per paragraph type =rand(5,6)

If you want to add the numbers in cells A1 to A3, type the numbers in cells A1 to A3, then select the blank cell A4 and type =A1+A2+A3 and hit enter. You can use this technique to add as many cell as you like. But if want a still easier way to do this, then select the cell where you want the sum of cells to be displayed and click on the autosum button and press enter.

Sometimes clicking on start menu, then clicking on shutdown button and then clicking on shutdown or restart button seems a long method to shutdown or restart your pc. If you want to create your own shutdown or restart you can do it this way:

Right click on desktop > click on new > click on shortcut

Type shutdown > hit enterHit enter again.

You have your new shutdown icon on the desktop ready to be double cliked!If you want to set the time after which your pc shuts down and display some message you can do that by typing the shortcut name as ‘shutdown -s -t xx -c “message” Where xx represents the time in seconds after which your pc will shutdown. You can type any message such as “bye everyone” in place of “message”, but it should be enclosed in double quotes. e.g. shutdown -s -t 05 -c "bye everyone”

Similarly if you want to restart your pc you can type the name of shortcut as shutdown -r -t xx -c "message"

How to show your photos as screen saverRight click on desktop and click on propertiesSelect the screen savers tab and select the My Pictures Slideshow from the dropdown menu.

It will show slideshow of your pictures saved in my pictures folder in my documents.If you want to specify some other folder containing your pics, click on the settings tab, and click on the browse button. Browse for the particular folder containing your photos and click ok.

You can also set other parameters from the settings menu such as how often should pictures change, how big should pictures be etc.

It is better to change the location of my documents in order to prevent all your important documents in case of a system crash. By default, the My Documents folder is saved in the hard disk partition containing the operating system. So, if your windows xp installation goes bad, and formatting the system partition is the only way, you would lose your My Documents folder too. To prevent this, you should change the location of My Documents folder to some different partition of your hard disk. To do this,

Right click on My Documents folder and click on properties.

Click on move and select the new location where you want to place the folder.

If you have some of your files that you don’t want others to open, you can protect them by assigning a password to them. This way, every time anyone tries to access it, he/she will be prompted to enter the password.

To make your file private, just right click on it > send to > compressed folder

Now open the compressed file.Go to file menu and click on add a password.

Enter the password for the file and click ok.

The next time you try to open that file you will be prompted to enter the password. You can delete the original uncompressed file. This way only you can open the file. You can use this procedure for password protecting your other files.